George Rebane
Woke up a couple of days ago to a National Propaganda Radio segment on business; those guys sure know how to report them. Big ballyhoo on Obama’s visit to Intel’s new, highly roboticized chip manufacturing plant, slated to be the largest in the world when it kicks into gear. The CCO sang loud praises about Intel bringing back manufacturing jobs to America. But not a peep was said in the segment about Intel being a California company where it has always manufactured chips, and why it went to Arizona to build its new showcase manufacturing plant.
Indiana has joined the growing cohort of right-to-work states. The unions pulled out all stops, but those darn workers saw right through the whole thing. The administration was crowing about the unions adding members this year. But what they didn’t tell us is that union membership as a fraction of the workforce is continuing to plummet; it’s down 11.8% since 2002. The only gains they’ve seen is in the public service union penetration where they have corrupt, double-dealing elected politicians paving the way for them to hold up taxpayers through their huge compensation packages and disasters of unfunded pension liabilities.
In the meanwhile the nationwide green jobs initiatives are continuing to take swan dives into Chapter 7 and 11 bankruptcies. The latest loudly touted disaster is Ener1 which declared Chapter 11 less than a year after Joe ‘The Lip’ Biden’s visit and speech where he presciently extolled the future of the country belonging to green energy and companies like “Enron1”. The way this administration is screwing up, he’s probably right on both counts.
The Republican’s have their own lip shooter in Newt. The former Speaker had us on the course to permanent moon colonies in eight years. Retired astronaut Gene Cernan (last man to walk on the moon) reminded everyone last night that NASA no longer has a means to even put an American in orbit, and that its long term strategic plan is a “Mission to Nowhere”. He recommended that we restart our space program with well-directed “small steps”. Oh, how the mighty do fall.
An interesting financial demographic is the dynamic of the shrinking middle-class. It seems that the IRS tells us that over the last decade or so, a lot of the middle class have escaped upward into the lower tiers of the upper class. Sumbich, and here we thought from all we heard on the media was that everyone in the middle was sinking into abject poverty without gummint help. But that’s the lamestream for you.
From the last Republican debate we saw Mitt and Newt go at each other about “immigration”. The exchange descended below stupid when Mitt took Newt to task about his accusation that he Romney was “anti-immigration”. Mitt got on his high horse and announced that since his ancestors came from south of the border, he could never be “anti-immigration”. Of course, that little dust-up occurred because we still use ‘illegal immigration’ when talking about the illegal alien problem. If we understood that there ia no illegal immigration problem, but only one of illegal aliens entering and going underground in America, then people could speak clearly about immigration, which we need, and illegal aliens, which we don’t.
Oh, there’s more about the lamestream telling you all the news that’s proper for you to know. This January, like every January, tens of thousands of pro-life folks gathered again for their annual march in Washington. None of the big three broadcasters, nor the NYT, made any mention of it – zip. But a couple of lesser lamestreamers did pick up on the pro-choice counter demonstration fringe, and made that look like that was the only demonstration going on in the nation’s capitol. We have to be carefully spoon fed.
Finally, Meryl Streep is reported to have turned in a fantastic job portraying Margaret Thatcher in the ‘Iron Lady’. The only trouble with this usual leftwing Hollywood production of history is that it leaves out the importance what Thatcher accomplished in Great Britain’s massive de-nationalization of industry and her abhorrence of socialism as a form of governance. We recall that it was she who advised us that ‘Socialism works only until you run out of other people’s money.’
Author Daniel Yergin (The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World) writes ‘The Real Margaret Thatcher Story’, a tight and informative summary of Lady Thatcher’s political life in the 26jan12 WSJ. It is the story that progressive Hollywood would not touch with a ten-footer. But many of us still recall what that great woman did for her country and on the world stage. And so does her country, which is already making plans that when the time comes she will be given Britain's highest accolade, a state funeral in St Paul's, the first for a Prime Minister since Winston Churchill died in 1965.
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